With over 700 million snaps sent and received everyday, Snapchat is clearly growing to be one of our favorite messaging applications. And deservedly so. It is different. Unique. It takes instant photo and text messaging to a whole new level.

With its latest update, Snapchat now features video chat and text messaging. Its growing popularity can be attributed to the ephemeral nature of the snaps sent and received. Snaps disappear once you have viewed them. And there's no way to get them back.

But like all social apps, Snapchat too has a feature that isn't very popular with its users. And that's the Best Friends feature.

Understanding Snapchat Best Friends

Snapchat Best Friends, in the simplest of terms, are 3 friends that you chat with most frequently over the week. The list, at least theoretically, is constantly changing and updated every week.

You can find the Snapchat Best Friends list on top of your contacts list when you're about to send out a snap. It is also displayed publicly on your profile and can be seen by anyone who views your profile.

It can be assumed, for obvious reasons, that this feature was introduced for easy access to the people you most frequently chat with in the contacts list when you're about to send out a snap. It saves you the trouble of having to scroll through your entire contacts list to select the people you want to send the snap to.

And since your best friends are the people you snapchat with most frequently, it totally makes sense that the best friends list should be on top of the contacts list for easy access.

That said, it really doesn't make sense that the list is also displayed publicly on your profile. And anyone who views your profile can see the list.

There are many downsides to having your best friends list -- the people that you chat with most regularly -- being shown on your profile. But we'll get to all that in the other articles listed below:

Snapchat's official support page tells us that Best Friends are determined by a magical friendship algorithm. We'll try to understand how this algorithm works.

If you follow Snapchat's updates as closely as I do, you'll know that in Snapchat previously measures a score for each friend in earlier versions of the app. This score is the number of snaps exchanged between the two of you.

For your best friends, the scores are listed next to their usernames on your profile. Take a look at the screenshot below. It shows the profile view of a Snapchat user on an earlier version of the app.

This feature is however not available in newer versions of Snapchat. You can no longer see or know what your best friends score is.

But this establishes one thing. And that is: there is a Snapchat Friends Score that measures the number of interactions between you and each of your friends. Read more about Snapchat best friends score here.

We know from Snapchat's official site that best friends are the people you interact with most frequently over the week. This means that the best friends feature is updated on a weekly basis. As such, it follows that the best friends scores between you and your friends are measured for a week and then reset back to zero each week after the best friends list is updated.

Whoever has the highest scores within the week make it to the best friends list. Snapchat's algorithm lists your best friends based on the scores. This is not conclusive of course; other factors may also play some role in influencing the algorithm.

Subsequently, if you want to remove people from your best friends list, it means that you should find a way to decrease the best friends score between the two of you. This is explained in my post: Delete, Remove or Hide Snapchat Best Friends.

The explanation given here on how Snapchat best friends work is just a theory though and never actually proven. But I believe it's how it works. Since Snapchat does not give an official explanation as to the mechanics of snapchat best friends, this seems to be the only plausible explanation.